


Interference

by Seethedawn



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-30 02:49:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5147507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seethedawn/pseuds/Seethedawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I went back to her estate in the 90's.<br/>Just once or twice. Watched her growing up. Never said hello. Timelines and all that..."</p>
<p>Jack's always been pretty comfortable stretching the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interference

Jack’s time device isn’t working, not since the Doctor messed with it. 

It’s 1892, Jack’s in New York, maybe? He’s drunk himself into an oblivion and tries to pay the tab with money left over from his stay in 1940’s Britain. He doesn’t have enough, and they’re suspicious of the print anyway. In an increasingly poor display, Jack tries to run a credit card down the cracks in the wooden counter. He finds himself being forcibly escorted out by the irate owner’s sons. 

Jack dies in the muddy alleyway behind the building. 

And then, he wakes up. 

Jack is shot, stabbed, javelin-ed, hung, drowned, and shot a few more times for good measure. 

His time device won’t even take him back to Satellite Five and he has no method of communication with anybody useful.

It’s still only 1869 when he realizes he’s going to have to go the long way around. 

Jack keeps busy though. He won’t take part in any of Britain’s colonial adventures, and the morality laws are a goddamn nightmare. Never mind the whole religious issue. 

Jack joins up for World War One though. He gives his gas mask to a panicked kid in no man’s land. Still feels guilty as the poor boy watches, horrified and crying, while Jack hacks up a lung. 

Mustard gas is absolutely on his top 10 least favorite ways to go. Hell, top 3.   
But Jack always wakes up. 

For a while Jack follows Hitler around, just in case any other time travelers show up. Thinks maybe he could hitch a ride. But sitting in a café, watching Hitler paint and knowing what’ll happen in a decade or so, not killing him starts to creep Jack out. So he leaves Austria behind. 

In 1945 he’s back. 

One night in France, Jack looks up at the stars and smiles, softer and more real than any smile he’s had in a long while. Somewhere out there, Rose Tyler is hanging from a barrage balloon, with a Union Jack right across her front, decades before she’s born, thousands of years before Jack’s born, and God only knows where this night is on the Doctor’s timeline. 

The guys give him a hard time for such softie behavior, but they’re happy to listen to the (heavily edited) story of the girl Jack’s waiting for. 

The 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s are almost fun enough to make Jack forget about it all, though he can’t say he remembers much once they’re over. 

And in the early 90’s, Jack finds himself on the Powell Estate. 

He buys a tonic water from Mr. Tyler, listens while the man talks about his raging-mad pregnant wife. Jack’s heard stories about Jackie Tyler, and he buys a few more tonics in commiseration, thinking it’s the least he can do for the husband of the woman who slaps the Doctor in less than 20 years.

Jack’s been trained as a Time Agent. He knows he can’t interfere. He’s not here to interfere. Who’s interfering? 

He doesn’t save Rose’s Dad from being hit by that car. Doesn’t even try to contact the Doctor, because of his responsible attitude toward protecting timelines. 

But he’s a part of this timeline now. Not like he’s just visiting anymore. 

Mickey Smith’s walking home from school one day, alone because he lives with his blind grandmother. Jack honestly wasn’t stalking a young Mickey. He was stalking an even younger Rose, but that’s beside the point. Jack’s having a quick tea on a bench that just so happens to be on most used route for children from the local primary school to get to the estate, when little Mickey wanders past. 

Mickey the Idiot, Jack thinks, as a car pulls up and a man leans out of the window to chat with the boy. It’s raining, and Jack catches a reference to Mickey’s grandmother. 

He would have left it alone. Should have? But Mickey’s never gotten a lift home before, even in worse weather, and there’s something uncertain, hesitant about the way Mickey looks up and down the street before reaching for the door handle that has Jack on his feet. 

“Hey there,” he says, staring unblinkingly at the man, who immediately flushes and begins to shift in his seat, “don’t worry about giving young Mickey here a lift,” Jack lands a hand on the boy’s (startlingly low) shoulder, “I’ll get him home safe.”

The man in the car mumbles something, averting his eyes, and his tires spray water as he speeds away. Jack notes his license plate number. 

Mickey looks up at Jack, who asks, “Did you know that man?” 

The boy shakes his head. 

“He said he knew my Nan.”

Jack pats him absently. “C’mon, you’re on the estate, right?” and he escorts the boy home, silently, contemplating.

He presents himself to Mickey’s Nan as a Good Samaritan, who happened to notice and intervene. The poor woman is beside herself, and he has to drink several more cups of tea before she feels that she has begun to thank him. Mickey watches cartoons in the room behind them, oblivious. 

Jack wonders what the Doctor would have done. Not killing Hitler was one thing. Allowing Hitler to live past 1928 is itself a horrifying prospect, essentially helping to produce the misery and death of millions of people, but killing him would have been massively disruptive to the rest of Earth’s history. 

Mickey Smith, however, not so much. But would he stay in school longer now? Would he still date Rose? Would he still stay behind while she left in the TARDIS? Mickey’s eventual connection to the Doctor automatically made him a complicated time-event. Changes to Mickey’s timeline could affect the Doctor’s timeline, which would create an incalculable mess. 

But Jack knew there was no version of events where he just sat on the bench and watched that little boy drive away in a stranger’s car, in the name of preserving the Doctor’s complicated time line. 

Jack’s interventions escalate slowly over the next decade. 

He’s walking through the Estate after the pubs have closed. It’s reached a point by the mid 90’s where Jack just uses the Powell Estate as the midpoint on his way to any destination. Tonight, however, he sees Jackie Tyler, bright pink and blonde and loud in the darkness, staggering slightly. She’s probably had the same kind of an evening as Jack, though it doesn’t look as though she’s holding it as well as him. 

Jack smiles to himself, and is ready to carry on in his direction when he hears Jackie shriek. A man is pulling her to the edge of the large concrete courtyard. She’s stumbling, can’t catch her balance, and he’s got a ski mask over his face. Peripherally Jack notices a few lights in the nearest block of flats go out. 

The masked man has a knife, and a tearful Jackie is rummaging through her purse, begging. Pleading with the stranger on behalf of her little daughter who’s waiting for her at home. 

The man is jumpy, desperate. Jackie can’t produce enough money to satisfy him. She’s apologizing for not having more when Jack reaches them.   
The quantity of alcohol Jack’s imbibed this evening make the difference, and Jackie screams as Jack goes down, chocking on the familiar taste of his own blood. Jack holds on long enough to see the masked man sprinting across the courtyard. 

When he wakes up, Jackie screams again, just as loud. She says into her phone, “He’s up now! Up and breathing and – OI!” as Jack bats her hands away. Her sleeves are bloody, and Jack presumes she’s been ‘keeping pressure on his wound’. 

“No ambulance,” he barks at her. 

And of course, she argues. 

“What d’you mean no ambulance?! You’ve been stabbed, you great twit!” 

The phone slips easily from her bloodied hands, and Jack snaps it shut. 

“No ambulances.”

Rose’s mother rolls her eyes, her whole expression emanating disdain, “suit yourself,” and then to herself, “men.”

She’s grateful though, Jack knows. Grateful and wary of him. She tells him that she’d invite him in for a cuppa, but her daughter’ll be asleep. Then she walks in the wrong direction, before circling back around to her block of flats. Jack can’t blame her for her caution. 

Years pass, as they always do. He has some interesting meetings with people who respond to his ads online though. Even finds a man who’s been tracking a Doctor Jack recognizes through history, and a few he doesn’t. Jack hadn’t known the Doctor long when he was stranded. Wishes he’d known about UNIT back in the 60’s. Could have spared himself a few decades. 

Rose is two short years from meeting the Doctor, she’s actually Rose now, in the way she dresses, speaks, behaves, when Jack gives in to temptation.   
She’s working at a fast food joint in a local shopping center, when Jack decides he really likes their hamburgers, and he needs one for lunch every day. 

Rose has his order memorized, and she’s started sort-of flirting with him during their brief conversations over the register. 17 year old Rose flirting with a now 100+ Jack is slightly unsettling, but it’s harmless. He’s grown out his hair, let his beard come in, changed his accent and lost his trench coat, so hopefully she isn’t going to recognize him 3 years from now. Hell, she’s 17, and in less than 2 years a Time Lord from Gallifrey is going to take her to see the stars. Jack’s definitely overestimating his own importance if he thinks she’s going to remember some middle-aged customer from her stint at a burger joint. 

But he gets to watch her chew on her hair, laugh with her coworkers, discuss Mickey’s potential as boyfriend material, and she smiles and laughs with Jack as she takes his order and Jack feels lighter than he has in a long time.

Rose is the only one behind the register one day, joking with Jack across the dining section, when a tearful Jackie shows up. Rose comes around the counter to comfort her mother, and Jack politely pretends to devote his full attention toward his half-eaten burger. 

It transpires that Jackie is sorry, so, so sorry, but she didn’t tell Rose last week that Henry had come by to borrow some money. He had promised, (“He promised, Rose,” Jackie sobbed) to have it back in time for the new month, but he didn’t, and Jackie went by his place and he wasn’t there, but his brother said he’d lost the money on the match Saturday, and Jackie didn’t know how they were going to get through the month now. 

Jack watches Rose’s reflection in the glass as it grows blank, but she doesn’t cease petting her mother. Jackie leaves when a batch of younger teenagers come in for lunch. They’re rude to Rose when she’s a little slow with their orders, clearly dazed.

The teenagers take their food to eat elsewhere, so Jack and Rose are alone again. She’s turned so she’s leaning on the counter, facing away from him. Jack watches her shoulders hitch as she tries to calm her breathing. 

He makes his decision. 

He knows he’s gotten too close, intervened too much as it is, and if he ever runs into the Doctor again he’s going to get hell for it. Well, if he’s honest anyway. And besides, he’s got some hell stored up for the Doctor himself.

“Rose?” He ventures, when he’s standing at the counter. 

“Yeah,” she says, turning with a last swipe of her hand across her eyes, “what’s-” and she stops. 

Jack is, quite awkwardly to be honest, pushing 4 50 pound notes across the counter. Normally he’s much smoother with this kind of thing, but the proceedings have never involved a crying teenage girl before. 

“Look, I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t hear all that with your Mum, okay? So, here, take it. Hope it helps.” 

He retracts his arm awkwardly. 

Rose’s arm twitches toward the money. 

“Why?” 

“What?” He asks.

“Why are you doing this?”

Jack shrugs.

“I’ve just had some luck recently, and you seem to need it more than I do. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

Rose narrows her eyes at him, and she hesitates before asking, “what – what would you want for it? Like, what would I have to do?”

There is a resignation in her eyes, even as the set of her hips seems to imperceptibly change, that sets an impotent, directionless rage roaring through Jack’s blood. 

“Nothing. You have to do nothing for it. I promise. I’ve just enjoyed coming here, and want to help out if I can.”

Rose picks up the money and thumbs through it absently. 

“Okay,” she says, still uncertain.

“Okay,” says Jack, “good.” 

Rose smiles at him, and it’s more tentative than usual, but also closer to the way she use to smile at him, the way she’s going to smile at him. 

The exchange got caught on the restaurant’s camera, and Rose gets fired for taking the money. But she gets a new job at a local department store soon after. 

She’s going to meet the Doctor soon, so Jack uses this change in her routine to bow unnoticed out of her life. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever see her again, but he hopes so. 

Two years later in 1945, Rose meets a man named Jack, and everybody lives. Back in the TARDIS she asks the Doctor if there isn’t anything they can do for Jack, since he took the bomb away in his ship. The Doctor’s already pulling at the TARDIS’s console, which is a good sign, when he asks why she likes him so much anyway? Rose admits that she can’t quite pinpoint it, but she just feels like she can trust him, and that he’s a good person, and that he deserves it. 

Music reverberates around the TARDIS’s interior as they settle somewhere new. The Doctor rolls his eyes, "you and your boyfriends," but he smiles as he hold out his hand for the dance.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't seen all of Torchwood, so I realize that some of his timeline is pretty inaccurate.


End file.
